Baby Boom

Nancy Meyers is a bit of a pain in the ass. I want to respect her because she’s one of the few name brand female writer/director/producer’s in the game, but she creates such odious stories around insular overly privileged women without a person of color or truly feminist thought rolling around in her films. What’s astounding is how easily she repackages stereotypes about females into her films, take for instance Baby Boom’s insistence that a woman cannot be fulfilled by a marriage and a high-profile career, she needs to throw it all away for a simpler life with a man’s man and a baby.

But dammit if I didn’t laugh a few times thanks to Diane Keaton’s flighty comic sensibilities. The “dragon lady”/high-powered bitch persona at the beginning is a little hard to swallow. Yet Keaton manages to make sense of the character by playing up the more career obsessed and emotionally frigid aspects, this helps to make her eventual slip into neurosis more palpable and easier to accept. Here is a woman entombed within her affluence and career that trying to raise a child is like trying to complete manual labor.

Yet these stretches offer only a few laughs, and mostly play against the innate intelligence of these characters. You’d think these people would have enough street smarts to know that feeding a newborn child a messy pasta dish was a bad idea, yet there is a scene where they do just that. Too often Meyers’s films feel like over-bloated sitcoms, and dreadfully routine ones. Oh look, the big city woman just needed to get back in touch with the real things in life to discover true happiness. As if focusing on work wasn’t fulfilling to some people, the film then goes on to loudly proclaim that small town Americana is somehow inherently more authentic than any other place. It’s a tired idea, one that feels as antiquated as the idea that all small town residents as folksy types with homespun knowledge to be doled out at just the right time. If you’re a fan of Keaton, like I am, she makes this thing somewhat watchable, otherwise it plays out like a CBS-level sitcom that is inexplicably popular despite not being very insightful, witty, charming, funny, or original. But boy howdy, it sure does pluck those tired old strings with verve.